Little Answers

1.  Lunch with A and talking about God, depression, and rock stardom.

2. 

3.  Beers with the boys.  Screaming “LIFE IS ABSURD” from the passenger seat.

4.  Forgetting old debts.  Drinking red wine and talking girls and politics with J until five in the morning.

5.  Chatting up that cutie at Fuse.  Acid with J and G on Foster Island.  Swamping.  Back to the bench, talking to the cops.  Dudes, the purple, it’s kicking in…

6.  BBQ in “the stew”.  The speakeasy that makes me feel Southern.

7.  Saying goodnight.  Walking home silent, showering the stink off, watching TV and going to bed.  My cup was empty.

8.  Making a good day from a broken phone.  Pulling G out of his comfort zone.  Beer on patios, with calamari and free meatloaf sliders.  Sorry with O in the park.  Making out after all these years.  That moment, right after you’ve lied down, where that arm reaches around and pulls her close

9.  Lunch at Honeyhole.  Bus to mom’s, bathe the cat and take a nap.

10.  Blue C Sushi with N.  Apologies and soul-searching.  A walk on the water and a chat with at the circus.  Last minute cards with B.

11.  Band practice.  Beer, watermelon, peanuts, and rejection with O.  So it goes.  She’s no good for me anyways.

12.  Practice.  Failing at the fixie.  Rocking the fuck out.  Daydreams of a packed house, a dance party, people screaming my name and demanding more.  Beer at Ivar’s with K.  Sitting on her patio with my arm around her.  Depression, dirt, isolation, public humiliation, heartbreak, sexual frustration.  Get it all out and get it in you.  Wisdom is having fucked up over and over again.  Confidence is having been the laughingstock enough times over.  God is having danced with the devil.  Love is repeated, relentless, heartbreak, soaked in the horniness of a million lonely nights.

13.  Never being alone.  The upswing of a manic cycle.  And, finally, happiness.

Depression

I don’t care who reads this.

My life is stupid. I work my job, come home, wait. Go back to work. It’s fucking depressing. I used to smoke pot to deal burn off my downtime, but all that does is ensure I stay up late and don’t get up in time for anything the next day. So I don’t do that anymore.

I don’t have many friends left. Most of the people I really connected to left after school, and what’s left it’s rapidly growing distant. Occasionally people my friends ditch me (with one notable example haunting my dreams at the moment), but most of the time it’s my fault. Whoo, boy, is it ever my fault. T – I forgot her birthday. Didn’t even call when I remembered. Christmas rolled around, and I fretted for weeks about what to get her (mind you, I still hadn’t even called her at that point). Randomly run into her at a party, and sheepishly I said hi and talked to her. It was nice. She sent me an email a few months later, real short and nice – “Let’s get a drink some time!” I responded, too late, that I was a fuck up and trying to change. I never got a response, and it turns out I didn’t end up changing.

That’s one is the worst, but I’ve done it several times. To relatives who always sent me something nice on my birthday. Friends from high school. People I genuinely liked and trusted, had history with, probably should have at least kept in touch with. Oh well.

Broke up with my girlfriend a few months ago. I felt dead weight in our relationship, while she still liked me. And now, she’s moving on, she’s going to parties and getting drunk and having fun, meeting new guys and making new friends. And I’m sitting around Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, alone. Bored. Lonely. And yet totally unwilling to go out and do it. Where do you start?

Fuck it. A, your probably the only person who will read this. I’m jealous because you’re supposed to be the shy one, the young inexperienced one, and I’m the sagely older one. But your life is going well, and mine sucks. I’m very jealous, and being older only means I have had more time to fuck up yet not learn from my mistakes.

That’s really the crux of it. I’m desperately, desperately lonely. Everyone has got their clique, their group of friends, and what do I have? I have a handful of random people I’ve connected with, people I couldn’t dream of inviting to the same party, who I see, one-on-one, once every week or so. How do you meet new people when you’re incapable of being comfortable around more than one at a time?

Debt

Debt sucks,

and it couldn’t be easier to fall into.

All you have to do is not make enough money

Or spend more than you need.

Neither is necessarily a sin.

Sometimes we have good reasons not to take a higher-paying job, like family or school, to volunteer, intern, apprentice, or to fight for our country.

and of course we have social commitments and entertainment and hobbies.

And some people devote themselves to a life of God and others jump out of airplanes, and lots of people only need enough money to drink and get high, and some are sustained by love.

So there are lots of good reasons why we might not make as much as we could.

But we also often spend more than we need. But what do we really need?

When I was in college, I made just over 800 dollars a month. Half my income went to rent, plus another hundred for utilities. That leaves about 75 dollars a week for expenses and let me tell you that is a frustrating income bracket to live in.

You can buy groceries instead of eating out, and pluck clothing fresh from the bin at Goodwill, buy a bus pass. But if you aren’t disciplined enough to slowly build up an emergency fund (and I’m not), any minor expense or fee can wipe you out.

But a good meal is one of the only luxuries regularly available to the chronically-broke. And so even though I shouldn’t have spent money on eating out, I did it anyways, because goddamn it I deserved to have something nice every now and then. Even if it is just a meal.

So it goes in nickels and dimes, but it goes, constantly.

In order to stay afloat, I grew very cautious with money, always afraid to spend it. Sometimes I didn’t spend it even when it was the right thing to do, because the next paycheck was a long ways off. And still at the end of the month the balance comes out negative.

Now add a grand of debt. I did this for five years.

I’m still going to mention that living within one’s means is very important, and that delay of gratification is a necessary skill for survival. But nobody should be forced to live like a monk. We all deserve a bit of comfort in this modern world.

And saving is important. But saving is a long-term strategy, and those are tough to stick with when you don’t have a short term strategy.

A month out of college, I signed up with a staffing firm. I had an interview appointment the next day (after a month of sending out resumes) and got the highest paying job of my life within a week. Three paychecks in, my debt was gone. I bought some new clothes and new toys and went out drinking to boot. And now I can save, really save, instead squirreling my ones and fives away.

The answer I had waited through for all of college was that sometimes you have to live like a monk, but only when it’s for a good reason.

And that a better job is only a staffing firm away.

Routine

There is nothing harder than doing something for the first time.

The first time you do your taxes. The first time you talk to a stranger at a bar. The first time you speak to a crowd.

What is it about the unknown that inspires such fear in the pit of our stomachs?

This genuinely bugs me. Regret in general is not a great policy, but I genuinely regret not doing so many things in my life. People I could have met, love I could have found. Money I could have saved.

As a rule, this fear turns out to be totally wrong. We get our taxes in, start a nice conversation, give a good speech. We’re elated and terrified and embarrased and proud all at once. It’s a rush, one of the best. So why did we worry about it so much?

This doesn’t just apply to the Big Important things, but the small stuff also. Maybe even more so. Why am I content to watch TV when I need to mail in a bill? There’s no audience, the only way to mess up is to do nothing. And yet, I procrastinate. What is that?

What talking to a stranger and mailing in a bill had in common for me, sadly, is that they both were unusual, not part of my regular routine. Granted, they both take roughly as much effort as brushing your teeth, and they’re all important. Yet I did one and avoided the others.

Here’s the rub – I’ve brushed my teeth roughly 20,000 times in my life. I don’t avoid it because I know exactly what it entails, how long it takes, how much effort it will require. I know how absolutely trivial it is, so I don’t even think about not doing it. It’s automatic.

Scary stuff, like talking to strange, hot girls, this I’m fairly unfamiliar with. Of course, rationally, I know that it’s roughly as difficult as brushing my teeth. Maybe easier. I’m good at talking. I should be fine. And yet, my gut doesn’t believe me. It overestimates. Assumes the worst. Alarm bells start going off. “DANGER DANGER,” it says. “ABORT MISSION.” And I do, my brain kicking me for listening to the gut.

Same thing with bills. Who knows why I hate doing it. I know if I don’t, I’ll get late fees. Get sent to collections. Fuck over my credit. And yet… The gut wins out.

I’ve long since forgotten where it read, but there’s a theory about this sort of fear, the gut-based panic, the dread. The idea is that it takes 250 experiences, positive or negative, for the fear to go away. For the brain to win out.

Take that first step. Pull the trigger. Don’t think about it a second longer, just do it. Even if it goes catastrophically wrong (and really, could the outcome really be any worse than not doing it at all?), you still win. 1 down, 249 to go.

And soon, sooner than you think, it becomes routine. It fades into the background, becomes automatic. As natural as brushing your teeth.

Clutter

I have always been a messy person. Growing up, I was always comfortable just tossing things on the floor. Why make your bed if you’re just going to mess it up tonight anyways? It just didn’t seem worth it. Not that I didn’t enjoy the serenity of a clean room – I could just live without it.

My mother did her best to drill this out of me. Through sheer force of will, she eventually trained me to put dishes in the dishwasher, take off my shoes when I walked in the door, and open cabinets with the knob instead of getting my goddamn dirty fingerprints on the glass. Et cetera.

“Slob”. I hate that word. It means more than just a messy room. Slobs forget to lock the door when they leave the house, they leave a mess in the kitchen but put the orange juice back empty. Slobs turn in half-assed homework full of “careless mistakes”. I hate that phrase too.

Same thing, really. They both say “you just don’t care”. So what? Why should I care? Maybe you’re wrong, huh! You’re the one spending half their free time vacuuming and wiping, I’m doing better things. Big picture-wise, it doesn’t really matter that my room is messy. I know where everything is.

I must have been maybe 10. My mom told me that when she was a slob when she was young. Her room was always a mess, too. And now she yells at me for producing too much dust. How did we get here?

“I don’t know, really… Eventually you start to just see things differently. It becomes important to you.”

Older now. College. Dorm room. On move-out day the cleaning woman told us that she’d never seen such a dirty floor, that we’d lose our deposit. First apartment. Two lazy bastards living in “the dungeon”. Empty beer cans and Christmas lights. A once-white IKEA coffee table, textured with ash, drops of hardened glue, coins stuck down with… something sticky, who knows. Now a house, five people forming a dysfunctional family. Sink full of dishes, always someone else’s. A floor that smelled like kegs and a fridge that smelled like death. And now I’m by myself, in a room shaped like a shoebox. Too much stuff. Every shelf packed with trinkets, clothes exceeding hangers and slung from shelves.

So why? Why is it messy? Maybe it’s true, maybe I just don’t care. Maybe I’m lazy. I dunno, that’s probably right. But I’m going to give myself a pass. I was anxious, I was paralyzed with dread. I was smoking a lot of pot, and stoners hate getting up. But then I started to figure out what was in the last chapter. Inbox Zero. Don’t be afraid to throw it away.

So I went through my closet and pulled out all those old clothes I’d never wear, put them in a paper bag and dropped them at Goodwill. I did my laundry, and hung up what was left. Then what. Then… how about paper? I got a lot of paper lying around here.  Stack it up. Toss that, save that, toss that. Mostly “toss thats”. Ok, what next?

And little by little, my room got clean. My bed got made, that big backlog of hanging up photos and taking out garbage got handled. And that’s the magic of Inbox Zero. Everything goes in the Inbox. Then start from the top and start working down. Don’t be afraid to toss it.

And eventually, clean! Immaculate. Vacuumed floors, bare surfaces. An empty room and an empty head. Who needs pot? The clean made me hungry. I WANTED to do work. I wanted to focus.

And I got hooked. Soon I couldn’t relax if my room was messy. I couldn’t sleep. “Hold on a second baby, I’ll be in bed in just second, I just have to vacuum real quick…” Old habits die hard, sure. I still don’t hesitate to just toss stuff on the floor. Sometimes my clean laundry sits in the hamper until it gets wrinkly. It happens. But it’s a lot better now.

Clutter is anything that doesn’t have a place. If it doesn’t have a place, then either you don’t need it, or you need to get rid of something else to make room.

Incoming

I thought a long time about how I was going to write this one, but what I have to say is nothing original.

Inbox Zero, as far as I know, was invented by Merlin Mann, the guy behind 43folders.com. He’s funny, and down to earth, and I’ll let him tell you about it.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925

Did you watch it? Go watch it.

It kills me to know some of you just skipped it. Why are you cheating? Why are you even reading this?

So here’s the idea, in a nutshell: Inbox Zero says KEEP YOUR INBOX EMPTY. A lot of this applies to GMail, and for good reason. For a long time, I wasn’t into webmail, because most webmail clients are terrible. But 10 minutes into using GMail, I was hooked. Sure, you get world-class spam filtering and the world’s best search engine for searching through your mail archive. But there’s more than that – GMail works how email ought to work – it groups all your mails into “conversations”, so instead of having tons of “Re: Re: Re: “replies cluttering up your inbox, everything gets displayed as one big thread. I can’t explain how simple yet mindblowingly-useful this is – just try it. It’s the good stuff, I promise.

Anyways, back on track. Inbox Zero says:

• Process your inboxes at least once a day. When you’re done, your inbox will be empty and your conscience clear.
• Start at the top, and work through. Make a quick decision on every single mail you get:
  • Delete: Just get rid of it (or archive it). This applies to 90% of the stuff that shows up in your inboxes. If you do decide to archive it, don’t get too bogged down in details – maintaining a detailed, sorted hierarchy isn’t worth the time it takes.
  • Delegate: Forward it to someone who can deal with it.
  • Do: If it will take less than two minutes to respond or do whatever the email needs, then just do it. When you respond keep it brief.
  • Defer: If it will take longer than two minutes, make an Action for it, archive it, and put it on a to-do list for later. I like to “star” it (it’s a GMail thing), so I can quickly see what needs attention without having it clutter up my inbox
• Get back to your day.

Now, this is about email, but it can and should apply to every inbox in your life – voicemail, post mail, all the random stacks of paper lying around your house.

Before I found this, I was using Thunderbird to read my mail, and I just left everything in my inbox when I was done with it. The problem was that I had no way of knowing what was handled and what was done. When new mail came in, I’d scan it real quick, then tell myself, “make sure to respond to him later”. If you’re familiar with me at all, this meant it never got done. And it showed. People called me “flaky”, and “irresponsible”, and “untrustworthy”, and they were right.

Now, if you send me an email that merits a response, you’ll get a reply as soon as I see it. Even if all I say is, “Ok, I’ll take a look at this and get back to you,” you still get something. And people started noticing a difference. I was “prompt”. I was “on top of things”. And they were right.

And that’s the wisdom here – when life throws you a challenge, you don’t have to do it, but you do have to do something. Obviously you’re not going to drop everything to respond to every new email. But don’t just say “Oh, I’ll deal with it later”, because that means you won’t, or that by the time you do, it will be too late.

Kit

I’ve noticed something interesting. Whenever someone says, “I’ll burn you a copy of that CD we were talking about” or “I’ll email you the link to that article” or “We are TOTALLY going to Europe this summer”, they are virtually always lying. It will never happen.

It’s not because they’re malicious, or because they’re lazy. It’s because they forget. But that’s no excuse. If you say you’ll do something, and you don’t, what does that say about you?

And EVERYBODY does it, and it’s incredibly fucked up. There is maybe one person in my life I can trust. Sure, you might burn me that CD eventually, but unless I keep bugging you about it, calling you trying to catch you at your computer, bringing you blank CDs, etc.. it won’t happen. My parents, my friends, my co-workers. Everyone.

We even do it to ourselves. I’ll be standing in the shower, or sitting on a bus, or watching TV, when inspiration will strike. A good idea, maybe a great idea. “Note to self,” I’ll say. “Don’t forget this.” And then I forget it. How many great ideas have I forgotten? I don’t like to think about it.

So, that ends today. Stop being that person. Become someone who is trustworthy. It is so easy you should be ashamed you haven’t done it yet.

A pen and a pad. I told you it was easy. You put them in your pockets, and pull them out when something comes up. Try it for a week, and see if you can live without it afterwards.

A night in the life

• Every night, I review my contexts and draw up a to-do list for the next day on the first page of my pad. For example, I’ll start with an item or two from @Work, whatever is in @Call and @Email, then some from @Errands, and maybe one for @Home. This is the last thing I do every night, and is the only way I can relax enough to eventually get to sleep.
• Go about my day. Check things off my list. Take notes as they come up – neat websites people tell me about, subjects I need to learn more about, things I need to get from the grocery store. On my little pad I probably generate 1-3 pages of notes per day.
• That night, before I plan the following day, I process my notes (more on this next post). I decide what I’m going to do about each note and update my home base. I also update the status of any Projects I’ve worked on and cross off any Actions I finished that day. Then I rip out the day’s pages from my pad and toss them in the recycling.

It works

Nothing ever “falls through the cracks”. If I ever think “Oh shit, I have to do X soon”, it gets done, because I write it down as soon as I think of it. I’m a better student and a better worker, because no one ever has to remind me of anything. I’m a better friend and a better son, because every time I think, “Oh, she would like that”, it’s in an email to them that evening. But most importantly, I’m happy. There isn’t a big amorphous cloud of “Shit I Need to Do” hanging over me, because it’s out of my head and on paper the moment it strikes.

A word on overbooking

When I’m planning my day, there’s a real tendency to schedule a bigger To-Do list than I’m reasonably able to accomplish. Sometimes, if I have a lot of time-sensitive things to get done that day, I overbook and hope for the best. But, in general, it’s really frustrating to get only 10% of your list done. It’s also a lot harder to accomplish difficult tasks when your list is stuffed with easy “filler” tasks. I recommend the Most-Important-Task approach described by Leo Babauta – pick 1-3 Actions you absolutely need to get done, and do them as early in the day as possible.

Of course, I also usually throw in some lighter tasks so I can feel the rush of crossing things off my list. In general, though, I’ve found it’s better to underbook than overbook your day. Inevitably, life is going to throw something you weren’t planning for, and you need time in your day and space on your list to factor these in.

Why

Self-help, as a genre, is nothing new. If you want to lose weight, there’s a program out there. If you’re in debt, here’s 20 programs to get you out of it. Someone’s figured it out, and written a book about it.

But there’s more to it than that. There aren’t many high-powered executives who put their families first and paint in their spare time – and also weigh 400 pounds. People who have it together tend to have it together in every aspect of their life, and people who don’t tend have problems everywhere.

And that’s why most help-self books tend to fail. There’s more to just getting fit than just exercising and eating right. If you’ve got it, you’ll do what the book says; if you don’t, the book goes on the shelf and that’s that.

GYST isn’t about getting out of debt or getting in shape or becoming a millionaire, though it applies to all of those. It’s the manual I wish I had all along.

Thanks to David Allen, Merlin Mann, and Leo Babauta, who provided most of the major concepts that in GYST.

GYST is dedicated to my sister Emily, who figured all this stuff out years ago.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

My success rate with to-do lists, historically, has been pretty crummy. The vast majority of my to-do items never got done, the list buried in a sheaf of paper or lost on my hard drive.

This was never an accident. Consciously or unconsciously, I lost that list on purpose, because it reminded me of how far I was from where I needed to be. And, like magic, once it was off my immediate radar, it dropped off the face off my planet. The list was three feet from where I was sitting, but it might as well have been at the bottom of the ocean.

Part of the problem with my to-do lists were that they were simply too big. When I see the 50+ items I have to do, I balk, and my stomach starts to turn, and it’s all I can do to hide from it. Without organization, how do you know where to begin? So let’s get organized.

Where do you work? Odds are, it’s probably in just a handful of different places. Some things you do when you’re on the phone, some things you do when you’re at your job, some things you do when you’re running errands. When we work is determined by the resources we have available – you can’t make phone calls at 1 in the morning (unless you’re drunk).

So we’ll organize our to-do list by Context (dictionary: “The circumstances in which an event occurs; the setting”). As a rule of thumb, we want as many as necessary and as few as possible. As a guide, mine are:

• Calls
• Emails
• Errands
• Home
• Recording Studio
• Research
• Social
• Work
• Web

Notice how Context differs from Projects – Context doesn’t care what the Action accomplishes, only the setting where it takes place. For example, “Get visa paperwork notarized” is an Errand Action, but “Book plane tickets” is a Web Action, even though both will get me to India.

Ready? Here we go.

1. Get a stack of 3×5 index cards, a pen, and the Project and Action lists we produced last time.

2. Label the top of an index card with each Project, and list all the Actions you’ve assigned to that project.

3. Now label the top of an index card with each of your Contexts. To distinguish your Contexts from your Projects, we precede the Context with an “@” sign (e.g. @Work).

4. For each task on your Action list (these should be only Actions that are unaffiliated with a Project), write it down under the appropriate Context.

5. Now, add the Next Action for each Project to the appropriate Context. One per Project, and no more. If you have to map out every step of the Project, do it on the Project card – that’s what it’s for.

6. Recycle the Action and Project sheets; you won’t need them again.

That’s it – you’ve created the home base for the rest of your life. Lock your cards up with a binder clip, put them in an box, and stash it somewhere convenient.

Except, maybe not. Maybe index cards will work for you, but not for me. Over years of being a student, my ability to ignore paper has become extremely well-honed. It would only be a matter of time until I had buried them. Out of sight, out of mind.

So I use a website called “TiddlySpot” to keep track. Functionally, it is identical to the cards, except you have the option of filing Actions under multiple Contexts which is occasionally useful. What’s important, though, is that every time I open a Firefox window it loads up tabs for Gmail and my TiddlySpot page. No hiding from that.

So try both, and see what works for you. Go to tiddlyspot.com, and choose the “MonkeyGTD 1.0″ flavor. It’s very intuitive – once you’ve set up your Contexts and Projects, just click the New Action buttons on the appropriate Context or Project page. And save. Constantly.

When you carry your to-do list in your head, there’s no turning it off. Having to remember things makes every job multitasking, and when you do two things at once you won’t do either of them well. But get it out of your head and onto paper, and you reclaim your ability to live in the moment. Out of sight, out of mind.

Reductionism

Would you rather…

A) Read a book report

B) Write a book report

If you’re anything like me, you’d pick A. Why is that?

Well for starters, reading a book report is easy and writing one is hard. Reading a book report doesn’t take very long, but writing one takes a long time. Reading a book report is simple – you read it, and you’re done. Writing a book report is complicated – first you have to read the book, then you have to write an outline, then you have to write the paper, then you have to edit it, then you have to have other people edit it.

Really, A and B are two totally different things. A is an Action – a single, physical, visible task that is generally done all at once. B is a Project – it is an abstract concept, made up of several different Actions that you have to do in a more-or-less specific order.

There’s also another big difference. People like doing Actions, because you sit down and do them and check them off your list and get warm fuzzies for having finished them. People hate dealing with Projects. People avoid doing Projects, they procrastinate and wait until the last minute and look for an action, any other action to avoid doing a project. With projects you can work and work and still have nothing to show for it. There’s no instant reward. Very frustrating.

So that big brain dump, that master to-do list we made? It’s time to divide it up. Here’s the next step.

1. Get a pad of paper and a pencil.

2. Write “Projects” at the top of the sheet.

3. Go to your master to-do list and find a Project.

4. Write down the Project on your Project page in big letters and underline it. Now go through your master list and find any Actions related to this Project. If you find any, put them under the Project heading and cross them off the master list. (For now, don’t worry about making up any new Actions for your Projects. Just get any existing Actions off the master list.)

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until there are no Projects or Project-related Actions on your master list.

6. Now for each project, identify the Next Action for each of your Projects. This is the very next Action you will make along the way to finishing the project. You may have already listed it, in which case circle it. If not, write it down. For example:

Project – Get a better job

Next Action – Write a resume

Can you feel it? Can you feel how close you are?